More boxes, more trucks, more stops, and more congestion This past holiday season, to the delight of retailers, saw shopping records broken left and right. Amazon set a sales record over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Cyber Monday hit a record $7.9 billion in sales. Online holiday shopping, at a predicted $126 billion, would mark an all-time record.
That also means a record number of online deliveries. The strong retail economy this holiday season resulted in a 5 percent increase in e-commerce deliveries year over year, said Professor José Holguín-Veras, director of the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at New York?s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That meant more trucks, hauling more presents, and clogging more roads, than ever before. The increase in e-commerce and online shopping, and corresponding rise in deliveries, which experts call urban freight, has been dramatic. Between 2009 and 2018, urban freight traffic attributed to online shopping and e-commerce doubled, according to Holguín-Veras. In 2009, there was a single daily internet delivery for every 25 Americans. Today, there?s one for every eight Americans. And Holguín-Veras says that traffic will double again by 2023.
Today?s city streets and transportation networks simply were not designed to handle this additional flood of packages and freight trucks, especially with the added pressure of next-day or, in some cases, next-hour, delivery.
?What percentage of these deliveries...